For sisters, recognition can only come from above

'Band of Sisters' featured at Milwaukee Film Festival

Sister Madeline Gianforte, who joined the Sisters of St. Agnes in 1986, performs Reiki on patient Noemi Torres-Baez at CORE/El Centro, a natural healing center that offers therapy for people of all income levels on Milwaukee’s south side. Credit: Gary Porter

Vatican II, the 1960s-era council of bishops that catapulted the Catholic Church into the modern world, profoundly affected every aspect of the church, not the least of all its female religious.

Cloistered for centuries and relegated in recent decades to roles in education and health care, Catholic sisters took seriously the bishops' call to engage in the broader society. And they branched out into myriad ministries, often to serve the poor and marginalized.

"They talked about Vatican II opening the doors and windows of the church, and it really did," said Sister JoAnn Persch, who ministers to immigrants in the Chicago area, many of them undocumented, with fellow Sister of Mercy Pat Murphy.

"For the first time, we were able to follow the signs of the times to see what the needs were in the changing world," said Persch, 79. "I know for me and for many women, that was very exciting."

Gianforte, 54, joined the Sisters of St. Agnes in 1986, long after the Second Vatican Council. But she was drawn, she says, by the many opportunities it made possible.

"Being part of a group of women so committed to a vision and ministry just gave me so much energy," Gianforte said. "That's what propelled me into religious life."

Decision leads to service

Gianforte's life might have gone another way. A three-sport athlete at Illinois Benedictine College in the early '80s, she had at one point recruiters from the Sisters of St. Agnes and the Chicago Hustle women's pro basketball team watching her from the stands.

Her decision has affected thousands of clients who have come through the doors of CORE since it opened in 2002, many at little or no cost.

Now, in a new eco-friendly building in Walker's Point, CORE offers a host of programs and services aimed at nurturing clients' bodies, minds and spirits. Options range from acupuncture and Reiki, an eastern practice discouraged by the Catholic bishops, to Tai Chi and Yoga.

This year it added a nutrition component centered on its rooftop garden. And over the years it has trained 70 educators who promote healthy lifestyle choices out in the community.

For Gianforte, it is all rooted in her Catholic faith and sense of spirituality.

"We all yearn to go back to the deepest place within us, the core of who we are, and reconnect with the divine," said Gianforte, who came to that revelation — and her life's ministry — during a night of prayer and meditation while working on her master's degree in holistic health in the 1990s.

For some, like CORE client and mother of two Noemi Torres-Baez, the experience has been life-changing. She began taking Reiki to deal with the pain and depression brought on by breast cancer and a double mastectomy.

"I feel so calm and relaxed, it has helped me to move on and heal," Torrez said through an interpreter. "When I came in, I was so fragile, so sad, and I am so much more at peace."

Persch's life as a Sister of Mercy is far different from the one she entered just out of Milwaukee's Mercy High School in the late 1940s.

"It was very strict. Of course we wore the habit. And we didn't mingle with the world because that would taint your holiness," said Persch, who met Murphy, 84, when they taught at St. Eugene's Elementary School in Fox Point.

Today, those sisters are very much in the world, traveling the state of Illinois and beyond to advocate for the rights of undocumented immigrants and reform of the nation's immigration laws.

Persch and Murphy were trailblazers in the movement and their order. The women were the first Sisters of Mercy in Chicago to live outside the convent. And they helped to found Su Casa in 1990, a Catholic community that provided sanctuary to political refugees fleeing from violence in Central America.

They and volunteers were instrumental in the 2008 passage of an Illinois law giving detainees access to religious workers in state facilities.

The women spend much of their time ministering to detainees and their families. The work, they say, has had a profound effect on the immigrants as well as the sisters. And it goes to the heart of how they see themselves as Catholics.

"I always go back to the Gospel, to Matthew 25 and what Jesus says about the last judgment," Persch said.

"He's not going to ask me how often did I go to Mass or if I prayed every day," she said. "He's going to ask me, 'What did you do for your brothers and sisters?' That's what you did for me."

If you go

"Band of Sisters," played to a sellout crowd at Fox Bay Cinema Grill in Whitefish Bay last week. It returns at: